JOHN MEANEY

14.3.14

ROMA ETERNA

Been offline blog-wise for ages. Is anyone still here? My bad. We were devastated here by the loss of our most beautiful cat Bonbon, who passed away. Such a loss.

Our trip to Rome had been booked beforehand, so we went anyway. It was welcome, though we'd failed to prepare the various excursions that we'd intended, and simply walked around the mix-of-millennia that is the eternal city. I like the place.
Part of my intended preparation had been to learn basic conversational Italian, kickstarting the process with the Michel Thomas course I've had for ages. But since all our plans went awry, I ended up going through only the first two hours of the course - if you've used his stuff, you'll know that's a little intro course in its own right. Armed with a visual dictionary and a phrase book, and I was right in there, to an extent I'd never have believed on the basis of so little time - even though I've used his other courses.

The Thomas deconstruction of language and the choice of what to teach first is astounding. A very interesting analysis by a reputable educational psychologist is Michel Thomas: The Learning Revolution by Jonathan Solity (hint: Thomas's ability to teach the core of a language in three days was nothing to do with charisma). If you've never heard of Michel Thomas, check out a documentary called The Language Master on YouTube.

Of course English is the lingua franca of contemporary western Europe, so in a capital city you don't need to know the native language. But that's really not the point.

There's a popular book on introspective personaltiies called Quiet which I've skimmed through. There's stuff I'm familiar with - the author quotes the findings of Tom deMarco and Tim Lister regarding the success/failure factors of software projects (the primary cause of failure, from rigorous analysis of 600 clients, occurs when workers cannot shut themselves off from distraction: the technology is irrelevant), and I'm wont to quote them myself, having attended one of their seminars some twenty years ago after reading their books.

What I hadn't come across was the notion that introspective people can perform better when devoting their time to one task at a time. Hence my division of time in recent years, when I've worked only on computing or only on writing for extended periods. This is in contrast to fitting in writing around a full-time job in the 1990s, when I had to treat writing as a daily discipline, as per martial arts and physical conditioning.

(Actually, I treat the last two activities as a single thing, which is the advantage of training at home, in my case in a big breeze-block double-size shed in the back garden. No luck involved, no more than that I'm "lucky" that I have the benefits accrued from training every day. And I like training in an unheated primitive environment after dark in the depths of winter.)

I'm writing material for a grad programme right now, which means the book I was working on is done. But I can't say anything more right now. Sorry!

With luck I will be able to say a little more when I get to mix with lovely fandom, which will happen twice over next month. Speaking of doing one thing at a time... Looks like April is Convention Month:

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About Me

John Meaney is a lifelong martial artist, a computer consultant with degrees in physics and computer science, and a trained hypnotist.

As an author of several series, he has won the IPPY Award and been a finalist for the BSFA Award multiple times.

A new series of contemporary cyber thrillers features Case, a spec-ops cyber specialist who hears voices in his head. And then there's his fearsome partner Kat...

His near-future thrillers feature Josh Cumberland, an ex-special forces cyber specialist driven by family tragedy, desperate to do good in a near-future Britain wracked by climate change, a legalized knife culture and political corruption.

The Donal Riordan novels feature a detective in the spooky city of Tristopolis, where the sky is darkest purple and the city’s reactors are powered by the bones of the dead.

His seven Pilots novels include the Ragnarok trilogy, which begins with alien influences on humans at the dawn of the Viking era, includes the birth of the digital age at Bletchley Park, and concludes a million years from now with a conflict against forces from beyond a cosmic void.